Rehearsing

Authority is perhaps the most obvious principle of persuasion, and the one the conductor relies on as a matter of course. People are more likely to comply with people they consider to be credible as experts or leaders. So, getting the job title of Musical Director goes a long way to helping you get your way in rehearsal.

It’s not always as simple as that of course. This principle relies on its effectiveness not so much on the actual expertise of the authority (useful as that will be in all sorts of ways), but about their perceived expertise. Whether or not their estimation of skill is accurate, a choir member who doubts your capacity to do the job undermines your legitimacy, and thus your power to persuade. It can be as arbitrary as thinking that a woman should not be directing a male chorus (yes, that has happened to me).

The second of Robert Cialdini’s principles of persuasion is self-consistency. That is, people are more likely to go along with something if they perceive it as aligned with commitments they have already made. This one has a lot of potential for the choral director I think. It has power for both good and ill, so needs handling with care.

The first of Cialdini’s principles of influence is the idea that people are more likely to agree to something if they feel it is in return for something they have already received. This makes intuitive sense, of course. But an interesting twist to this is that people will feel indebted even if the thing they have been given was unsolicited, and even if it is something they’re not particularly interested in. This is why Hari Krishna people give flowers before soliciting donations. You may not want a flower, but once you’re holding it you don’t feel so comfortable about not giving anything in return.

So, what is the conductor’s version of giving someone a flower?

The cliché goes: Amateurs practice until they get it right; professional practice until they can’t get it wrong.

This is probably quite a good generalisation. What I find interesting is that I usually hear it from amateurs who have completely misinterpreted it. It is trotted out in support of a rehearsal strategy that involves endless drill and the desire to be able to ‘do it the same every time’.

Now, I’m not knocking reliability in performance. It’s good to know that you can produce the goods in front of an audience without screwing up. I’m just questioning (a) whether drill is the best strategy to achieve it and (b) whether it is the best use of rehearsal time. After all, as Kaplan points out, the goal of rehearsal is to change things, not to make them the same.

Robert Cialdini’s Influence is one of those useful books that gives a nice clear framework of ideas that can be applied in all sorts of situations. It presents findings from an extended research project dedicated to finding out what common techniques are used by people who are successful persuaders. There’s a good summary here.

I thought it might be useful to see how we might use some of these techniques to enhance our choral rehearsals. The musical director, after all, is in the business of persuading people to behave in particular ways, and we all find that some behaviours are easier to change than others. There are six themes that Cialdini explores:

One of the dilemmas that both performers and music educators face is how to manage the balance between practice/rehearsal that facilitates artistic or technical growth and practice/rehearsal that makes a performance more suitable for public consumption. They are both essential for the development of the musician, but they are actively in conflict – you can’t do both at the same time.

‘Don’t think of pink elephants,’ is the phrase Bill Rashleigh uses to get directors to think about the vocabulary they choose. Obviously, everybody immediately does think about pink elephants. A similar thing is likely to happen, he suggests, when a director says, ‘don’t sing flat’. ‘Hmm, flat’, goes everyone’s brains, and the pitch follows the thought obediently downwards.

So, the initial message is that we should couch our requests in positive rather than negative terms. Say what the music needs, rather than what’s wrong with it. This is good advice from Bill, and I’ve found that learning to follow it has had a number of useful effects beyond the simple one of avoiding evoking counter-productive thoughts in rehearsal:

Once we have persuaded people to let go of their previous habits, and changed the way they are performing something, we need to make sure that they will retain the change as a regular part of how they perform. There are two elements to this part of the process:

• Consolidate and keep moving
• Anchor the changes in the organisational culture